


promises / stars

by vl_kyrie



Series: Jetko Renaissance Week [3]
Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - She-Ra Fusion, Angst with a Happy Ending, Catgirl Jet, Crossover, F/F, Genderbending, Jetko Renaissance Week, i wrote this for me but yall can read it if you want, might not make a lot of sense unless ur familiar with spop but it's still jetko so
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 01:00:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27115777
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vl_kyrie/pseuds/vl_kyrie
Summary: Jetko Rennaissance Week - Day 3, Promise" “For the honour of Grayskull!” Zuko cries, raising the sword above her head. Flames lick up the blade. Zuko’s hair curls around her face like a thick smoke.“Is that Zuko?” asks Sokka, incredulous.“It’s She-Ra,” says Katara. Fire Nation soldiers around them scream their retreat. Across the way, Jet stares as she backs away, slowly.She-Ra stares back. "(ATLA/She-Ra crossover & genderbend, because I'm a lesbian.)
Relationships: Jet/Zuko (Avatar)
Series: Jetko Renaissance Week [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1976929
Comments: 9
Kudos: 17
Collections: Jetko Renaissance Week





	promises / stars

**Author's Note:**

> I had two entire canons to work with and somehow I ended up with absolutely nothing consistent to either show's lore  
> this is a labour of love but also pulled entirely out of my ass, as i am wont to do
> 
> this wanted so badly to be thousands upon thousands of words but alas , aint nobody have time for that, which is why i cut it short 💔
> 
> btw only zuko, jet and aang are genderbent. aang is mara in this au.
> 
> thank u for indulging in me <3

Fire Lord Ozai sits on his garish white throne, rests his head on laced fingers. A picture of grace. 

“I thought the First Ones were all gone, but clearly… some faction remains. That race of tyrants… abandoned you on a forgotten planet in a shadow dimension. They made you their weapon, their… She-Ra.” Ozai’s voice is low. Careful. 

Zuko draws herself up big, and with her teeth bared, spits “I don’t fight for the First Ones. I fight for my home, for myself, and for my friends. Now for the last time: where is Jet?” 

A voice, then. 

_ “Zuko?”  _ Jet calls out from somewhere Zuko can’t see.  _ Spirits,  _ she sounds so  _ scared.  _

“Jet? Where are you?” Zuko calls back, her head whipping around for a glance of something,  _ anything.  _ A mop of brown hair. A tail, a- a claw, reaching out from the depths of the darkness behind Ozai. Ozai gives a smirk. 

“Of course. Your  _ Jet.”  _ He says it in a  _ tone.  _ “She had hoped you would come for her… poor thing. So all I had to do was wait. As she would’ve said, “You are so  _ very _ predictable.” Ozai looks over Zuko’s head and says, “...Come here, child.” 

Zuko spins on her heel. There, a hooded figure, flanked by two Fire soldiers. They step up the stairs to meet Zuko and Ozai on the flat dais. The figure slips back the hood and it’s  _ her. Jet.  _ But she’s- she’s wrong. Her hair, her beautiful shaggy mess of brown hair is shorn down to a crew. Her eyes are blank disks. They glow gold underneath. A nauseating mimicry of the royal gold of Zuko and Ozai’s own. The way she stands: stiff, jointed, a doll on a set of strings. Her face is passive and unnaturally blissful, so much at odds with the way every muscle in her form is taut, tense. Fight or flight. She smiles, and Zuko wants to weep. 

“Hello, Zuko.” 

…

Twenty years ago, a man stands in a field of wheat. In front of him is a portal. A rift. He stares into it, and the Spirit World stares back. 

Ozai reaches in. When he takes his hands back, he holds a child. A girl. Pale, pale skin and jet-black hair. The girl opens her eyes, and white-gold meets Ozai’s own. 

Fire.  _ Pure  _ fire. Just like he was promised. A child, with blood from  _ before -- a First One. _

Ursa cries when she holds the girl to her breast that night, still swollen and heavy from the third child she lost without ever getting to meet. 

“My girl,” she whispers to the baby, to herself. “My daughter.” Her voice breaks and she clutches her tighter. Ozai thinks she is trying to convince herself more than anything that this one is here for good.

…

A year and a half later, the midwives are proven wrong, and Ursa carries her second daughter to full term. 

Four years after that, only one of the children has their fire, and it is not the one Ozai was promised. 

Ursa disappears a year later, and it is five children she has lost now. 

…

Zuko does not have fire. Not like she is supposed to. She looks the perfect part; looks just like a fire bender is supposed to, like they did at the beginning of time, like the First Ones. The first benders. But no matter how hard she tries, she cannot conjure even the tiniest spark. She is a disappointment, a failure, and Ozai reminds her of this with every breath. 

Azula does have fire, however. She is the first bender, apart from Ozai, to be born in the Fire Nation in generations. She is raised to be the next Fire Lord after Ozai. Zuko almost learns to be okay with this. It still hurts her down to the core that she cannot give Ozai what he wants, but she keeps trying. She practices her forms every day, reads all the scrolls she can find about bending and magic and tries to find a way, any way, to be  _ enough.  _

Zuko is nine when someone leaves a Magicat girl on the edge of the palace. It’s past midnight in the heart of winter. She’s dirty and sick, but Zuko is sure everyone else is asleep, so she smuggles the girl inside to her bedroom and bathes her, brushes her hair. She dresses her in warm clothes -- her own spare robes. The girl lives through the night; Zuko makes sure of that because she tucks the girl into her own bed, watches her the whole time. Changes the wet cloths on her forehead and makes her sip from glasses of water. Memorizes the exact shade of tawny fur that dusts her whole body. The bicolour of her eyes: amber and aquamarine. Whisker-freckles on her cheeks. Two pointed ears on the top of her head, still covered in a baby coat. Her little tail, gently striped, curling around her ankles. Maybe Zuko’s a little bit in love.

They’re discovered by morning, of course. Azula is the one who convinces Ozai to let Zuko keep the girl: a pet project. A hobby. The girl says nothing, doesn’t flinch once even when Ozai scruffs her and tells Zuko that  _ she is your responsibility and yours alone. If she turns out to be more trouble than is worth keeping around, I will personally ensure that she will never leave the palace as anything more than a handful of ashes.  _

She sleeps at the foot of Zuko’s bed that evening. Zuko offers to share half the bed, but the girl refuses, on principle or otherwise Zuko doesn’t know. 

“You were really brave earlier,” Zuko whispers to her in the dark. “With Father.”

“What kind of choice did I have?” The girl says in response.

Zuko doesn’t have an answer, and the girl knows, because she huffs and settles her head back on her folded arms. She flicks a pointed ear.

“What’s your name?” Zuko asks instead.

“Don’t have one,” the girl says simply. She unsheathes a single baby claw from the rough pad of her index finger, nibbles the dull end off the tip. Her claw shines dark in the moonlight that streams in from behind the bedroom curtains. 

“Can I call you something, then?” But the girl just shrugs at that, so Zuko ventures, “Catra.”   
  


“No way! You’re not naming me after an animal,” the girl hisses, which Zuko thinks is ironic, but she doesn’t care to argue logistics. She scratches her brain instead for something else, something that  _ fits,  _ like…

“Jet Black,” Zuko suggests, eyes following the movement as the girl flexes her hand (paw?) and each of her claws curl into the blankets. “Like the stone.”

“Just Jet.” 

“Jet,” Zuko agrees. 

The girl --  _ Jet  _ \-- nods once, then falls silent again. Zuko thinks she must have fallen asleep, but then she says, “...You took care of me.” It’s not quite a  _ thank-you,  _ or even a question really. But Zuko knows what she means.

“Yeah,” she answers. 

“Why?”

“What choice did I have?” Zuko says, and that’s that, because Jet looks at her with something akin to surprise, before turning her back to Zuko and really going to sleep this time.

...

Zuko gets put in charge of her own training squadron. She climbs the ranks best she can, all teeth and nails, with Jet following just behind. They stay up late most nights and whisper about nothings. They make promises to each other in the dark:  _ You look out for me, and I look out for you.  _

__ Zuko is something close to  _ happy. _ And even if she'll never compare to Azula, maybe this can just be enough. Her and Jet. Just the two of them and the life they build in the Fire Kingdom.  _ Nothing really bad can happen as long as we have each other.  _

Then, when they are both eighteen, Zuko finally,  _ finally  _ gets her fire. But it’s too late, and what comes with is worse than had she just died a non-bender, right then and there. 

In the Whispering Woods, just outside of Fire territory, Zuko wraps her hand around the sword, and it’s like a million little gears in her body click into place at once and her breath sparks and her eyes glow and she hears the whisper poured directly into her mind,

_ “Balance must be restored. Etheria has need of you, Zuko. Will you answer its call? Will you fight for the honour of Grayskull?” _

A lot of things happen very quickly after that. 

She is discovered by a pair of Water siblings; rebellion soldiers. They take her back to their kingdom, after they are stopped by Fire soldiers desecrating a village in Water territory. 

(Jet’s there. She came to find Zuko. 

“Jet, no. I can’t go back. Not until the Fire Nation leaves this town alone.  _ Help me,”  _ Zuko pleads. 

“What are you saying?” Jet asks.

“I’m saying, this is wrong. They’ve been lying to us, manipulating us. Ozai, Azula, all of them.” 

Jet pauses, then her face twists into something dark. 

“Duh! Did ya just just figure that out? Manipulation is Ozai’s whole thing. He’s been messing with our head since we were kids.”   
  


“How could you possibly be okay with that?” Zuko chokes out. 

“Because, it doesn’t matter what they do. The two of us look out for each other. And soon we’ll be calling the shots. Now, can we go home?”

Zuko grits her teeth. “I’m not going home. Not after everything I’ve seen. Come with me. You don’t have to go back there. We can fix this.”

“Are you kidding?” Jet hisses. “You’ve known these people for, what, a couple hours? And you’re just gonna throw everything away for them?”  _ Throw me away,  _ remains unsaid. 

“What happened to you?” Jet says, quietly.  _ To us. _

Zuko doesn’t get a chance to answer, because Katara swoops in and delivers a burst of water to Jet’s head. 

“What are you doing? Why did you  _ save me?”  _ Zuko asks.

“We need you,” Katara answers. “We need She-Ra.”)

“For the honour of Grayskull!” Zuko cries, raising the sword above her head. Flames lick up the blade. Zuko’s hair curls around her face like a thick smoke. 

“Is that Zuko?” asks Sokka, incredulous. 

“It’s  _ She-Ra,”  _ says Katara. Fire Nation soldiers around them scream their retreat. Across the way, Jet stares as she backs away, slowly.

She-Ra stares back. 

“Jet,” she says, one last time. She can’t help but sound like she’s begging.

Jet gives her one last look,  _ betrayal, _ then turns and slips back into the chaos.

That day, Zuko gets her fire, and her destiny, and at the same time she feels like she’s lost something bigger than either of those.

…

One hundred years before Zuko was born, there were stars. 

_ They were so, so beautiful _ , the old woman in the village would say to anyone who listened.  _ Like the sky was full of little white embers.  _ The village children were the only ones who came to hear her stories anymore. That is, until their parents would come and usher them away, quickly, quickly, don’t listen to the senile old woman, she’ll fill your head with nonsense. Because that’s all they were anymore: stories. Nonsense. It’s not their parents’ fault they didn’t believe her. Aang, the last She-Ra, took them away a long time ago.

The old woman was six years old when she saw the stars for the last time. She didn’t remember any sort of in-between, just that one night they were there, like a glittering diamond tapestry in the sky; the next, gone without a warning. If she had been any older at the time, she might’ve remembered the grief that fell over the whole planet in a heavy hush. The pitch-dark of every night, save for three round moons in the sky -- nothing more. If she had been even older, she might’ve been able to remember the constellations and the stories that went with, now left only in memory. A library burnt to a crisp. 

When Zuko was a year old, the old woman died peacefully in her sleep in her little house in the village, and the last of the stars died with her. 

…

Now, they are both twenty years old. In Fire Lord Ozai’s throne room, Zuko and Jet dance around each other in a flurry of fists and claws. Jet lunges after her over and over. She’s still smiling, taunting, with that hollow look behind her glowing eyes. Ozai’s done something to her, stripped the will out of her body. There’s no hesitation in her fight. She streaks Zuko across the face with her claws, and Zuko stumbles back with a cry. Jet almost laughs, but then her body spasms, crackles with electricity, and she falls to her knees with a grunt of pain. 

“Come on, Jet!” Zuko’s voice is shaking. “You’ve never listened to anyone in your life! Are you  _ really  _ going to start now?!”

The glowing sheen on her eyes flickers, and then for a moment Jet’s face is  _ clear,  _ and she looks like herself again, even so, so scared as she is. 

Jet smiles sadly. “You’re  _ such  _ an idiot.”

Zuko bursts out with something in between a sob and a laugh. “Yeah. I know.” 

Jet hisses and hugs her arms around herself as she convulses, the gold glimmer of Ozai’s control threatening to overtake her again.

“Jet, I’m going to take you home,” Zuko says, quietly, desperately. Jet peers up at her with clear eyes, and her breath shakes on the inhale as she says,

“Promise?”

“I promise!” Zuko reaches out her hand. Jet reaches back, but before they can touch, her bones crack and Jet’s body reels back, away from Zuko, stumbles backwards. The oily gold sheen is back across her face. She teeters dangerously close to the ledge of the pit in the floor; under it is a deep expanse of  _ nothing,  _ going straight down to black. 

“Disappointing. Some creatures are destined only for destruction,” Ozai and Jet’s voices say together, mechanically, robotically. Jet screams as electricity floods her body once more, and she falls backwards, down, down, down, into the nothing. 

A “ _ No! _ ” tears itself out of Zuko’s throat, and she hurls herself down after Jet without another thought.  _ Spirits, please, don’t let me lose her now.  _

…

In the depths of Ozai’s palace, Zuko holds Jet’s trembling body close to her chest. 

“I am sorry for the needless waste, Zuko. It did not have to end like this. Are you ready to cooperate?” Ozai says from a distance. 

Zuko’s hand shakily strokes down the back of Jet’s neck. Then, with a silent prayer, she lowers Jet’s body away from herself. 

Her eyes blink, and when they open, they glow magic blue. 

“...For the honour... of  _ Grayskull! _ ”

…

After the war, Zuko holds Jet’s face in her hands, and they laugh and press their noses together.

“He’s gone,” Zuko whispers, incredulously. “We did it.”

Finally, they are safe. They are  _ together.  _ Nothing bad can happen to them anymore.

The stars are back, and they form a gleaming blanket of safety around them both. 

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> dont ask me abt the lore because i have no idea. it's just a guessing game at this point. I had an outline and then i made the bold move of disregarding it completely in favour of making shit up as i go along. (do not do this it does not work)
> 
> also if i get the pronouns wrong at any point please lmk lol. I forgot halfway through that this was supposed to be genderbend so i had to go back and try and manucally fix it, but i mightve missed something idk


End file.
